Well I've managed to reach the record a couple times and sort of got answers to some of my more pressing questions which you can read about here.

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=21470&p=138620#p138620

For me at least, it doesn't seem to like answering directly and just tosses out hints that lead to answers. Anyway my question now is what to do next. Should I try to get more specific answers to any of these? I have a feeling that probably wouldn't work since it just seems intent on not answering directly. I do have other questions but they aren't as pressing as those were so I've been thinking its time to move on and try some other stuff, since I don't want to be spending all of my astral time in the record.

So decided next I should do two things, one is to try to verify some of this, something I haven't had alot of luck with in the past due to dream elements and just plain forgetting to try. Unfortunately I completely forgot to do that today. And the other is to perfect some skills that will probably be nessecery when I go off to explore other worlds such as changing shapes, teleportation, flight and astral combat.

This morning I projected and decided to try shape changing my astral body again. I have tried this three times in the past and it has always been very difficult, I've never been able to fully change into anything else, I always just go part way and quickly revert to normal once I stop concentrating. Today wasn't any different in that respect. What I did do different was that I tried to extend the time in which I was outside my body. Usually I can only come out for a max of about ten minutes at a time. So what I did was that I found the door anomaly I usually use to go to the record and focused on going to a place where time moves slower then it does here. So I went through it, at first it looked like the bathroom usually represented by the record but then it seemed to change into a chinese restaurant for some reason. After this I decided to practice my shape changing skills, as usual I wasn't able to fully change form and quickly shifted back after trying. One issue I ran into was other people seemed to be present in the chinese restaurant and I wasn't really comfortable changing form in front of them even though they were probably just dream elements. Anyway this projection did seem to last longer then the others, so maybe my idea of going to a place where time moved more slowly worked, as opposed to ten minutes or so I seemed to be out for twenty or so minutes this time. Though it would be nice if I could be out for hours, but this is a good first step I guess.

Anyway for those of you who have had more experience doing things like changing form in the astral and other stuff I'm trying to learn, how exactly did you master doing this?